No Masks in the Forest: Healing, LSD Retreats, and the Truth Beneath It All
When I came back to the West, something in me struggled. The pace. The disconnection. The way sacred traditions were being rebranded and sold in shiny packages.
People come to retreats for all kinds of reasons — heartbreak, burnout, grief, the sense that something’s not quite right but they can’t name what. Some come to find themselves again.
But underneath it all, what I see most is this:
People are tired of pretending.
They’re craving a pause. A moment to drop the mask and feel what’s real. To be around like-minded souls who want to take their own mask off, even just a little.
That’s what I offer in the retreats I hold now — foraging, yoga, connection to the land, its cycles and seasons, and a bit of mischief to reconnect to the wildness within. We gather in nature, eat banging food, breathe, move, laugh, and remember how to just be.
It might not sound revolutionary — but in a world of endless noise, speed, and performance, it is.
It’s a place to remember who you are, before you were told who to be.
To reconnect with the part of you that’s been buried beneath all the “to-dos.”
But I didn’t arrive at this work overnight.
Years ago, I followed instinct and found love in the Colombian jungle. My ex-husband was Colombian, and through him, I was welcomed into a world most people only read about. I lived it. I listened to the Earth. I learned from the people whose bloodlines have danced with those plants and spirits for generations.
Plant medicine wasn’t trendy there — it was sacred, necessary, woven into daily life. I sat with the vines, the leaves, the bitter teas that teach you who you really are. I learned that nature is part of us, not something outside us. That even without medicine, simply living close to the land teaches harmony. We are but reflections of the planet.
So when I came back to the West, something in me struggled. The pace. The disconnection. The way sacred traditions were being rebranded and sold in shiny packages. I was asked to work with people — often white shamans or facilitators trying to borrow the flavour of the jungle without the depth. I said no to many. I was wary. You can’t copy-paste that wisdom. It’s not a formula.
The roots don’t grow here.
And I’ve often wondered: is this just another form of taking? Of robbing the land once again — only this time, in spiritual disguise?
But then I met one woman who held something different.
She wasn’t “love and light.” She didn’t gloss over the hard stuff. She was grounded. Direct. Her approach to therapy was rooted in shadow work — sitting in discomfort, not bypassing it. That was my language. That’s what I’d learned in the jungle: the Earth holds both life and death, light and dark. Healing isn’t about escaping one in favor of the other — it’s about learning to embody both.
She wasn’t trying to save people. She created spaces where people could sit in their chaos and find the tools to save themselves.
She asked me to join her — to cook, to help hold space, to support people through mushroom ceremonies using medicine grown right here in our soil. That mattered to me. If something grows from the ground beneath your feet, it has a role in your healing. That’s how nature speaks.
Then she brought up LSD.
At first, I pulled back. I’m a plant girl. Deeply. I trust what grows from the earth. LSD felt… synthetic. Clinical. I’d raved with it in my younger years — I didn’t see it as sacred. But she said something that stayed with me:
“LSD is the medicine of the West. No cultural appropriation. It’s a medicine for the mind.”
She believed it was a mirror — not something imported, but something born of this culture, for this culture. And after I sat in one session, I saw what she meant.
LSD therapy isn’t for everyone. And coming from an addiction background myself, I’m cautious. It’s easy to jump from one escape to another and call it healing. Spiritual addiction is real — chasing peak experiences, replacing substances with ceremonies. But this wasn’t that.
This was 12 hours of sitting with yourself. No distractions. No filters. No masks. Everything amplified — your thoughts, your shame, your stories, your inner child. Nowhere to run. You learn to meet the resistance within — not to fight it, but to listen to it. To understand where it comes from. And that depth of work doesn’t just end when the session does. There’s aftercare. Ongoing support. Structures in place to make sure people are safe, grounded, and able to integrate what’s come up. Because real healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum — it needs community, care, and time.
And in that space, you start to see. The parts of you you’ve buried. The child inside who’s still shaping your adult life. trauma bonds, all of it. It’s not love and light — you have to find your own light. And in that process, something can shift. New neural pathways start forming. New ways of being become possible.
I worked many of those retreats. Holding space, grounding people, cooking food, being the human contact when things cracked open. And what I witnessed was nothing short of alchemy.
I saw grown men sob for the first time since childhood — grieving fathers and mothers who never hugged them, still searching for that safety in every authority figure, every partner, owning their deep feelings of abandonment and loneliness. I saw women speak truths they’d held in their bones for decades — the weight of silence, the shame passed down through generations, the ache of never feeling truly seen. I watched people fall apart and then hold each other, wordlessly. No fixing. Just presence.
I saw inner children — not just in visions, but in the way people spoke, moved, curled into themselves. In the sudden high-pitched giggles or the trembling hands of someone realising they’d never been allowed to cry. I saw mother wounds unravel — the longing for nurture, softness, the kind of love that doesn’t ask you to earn it. The ache for a mother who was never emotionally available. For a father who was physically present but emotionally absent. For safety. For home.
Underneath it all was grief — raw, unfiltered, ancestral. It wasn’t pretty. But it was real. And in a world that so often asks us to perform, to polish, to be “fine” — that kind of truth felt like medicine.
And perhaps that’s what the Western world is truly missing: the space to be. To feel. To stop pretending we have it all together. It’s exhausting, this endless performance. We’ve built lives so cluttered with distractions and expectations that we’ve forgotten the profound art of sitting with ourselves — of facing the truth of who we really are, without the need to escape, to fix, or to constantly chase the next thing.
A space where the masks can come off, where people aren’t selling you the next quick fix or shiny promise, but reminding you that everything you need is already inside you. To hold your inner child. To play in nature. To reconnect with the truth that you are part of this Earth — not separate from it, but woven into its very fabric.
And that’s where the real work begins. The quiet, ordinary, sacred work.